U.S. officials have claimed that Amiri was an informant for the CIA “for years” while in Iran, passing along vital information on the Iranian nuclear program. Last year he disappeared while visiting Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. The CIA claims he voluntarily defected. Tehran claimed at the time he was kidnapped. Amiri made YouTube videos claiming he had been kidnapped and tortured. Now he is back in Iran.

Was he a US spy we kidnapped, tortured, and then left to wander around unsupervised until he finally asked to go home? Unlikely.

Was he a double-agent whose defection and then return was planned all along? Maybe, but that would be an odd ploy, since it would eliminate him as a future Iranian conduit of false intelligence to the CIA.

Was he a genuine defector who had a change of heart and decided to play along with Iranian intelligence to get back in their good graces? Maybe, but that means this is largely his creation and I don’t like his long-term chances back in Iran.

He’s certainly a double agent now. The question remains, how long has that been the case? Any way you slice it, everyone ends up looking kind of stupid, each player to a greater or lesser degree depending on which scenario you buy into.

The unnamed Iranian intelligence source described this goat rodeo as “an intelligence battle between the CIA and us that was designed and managed by Iran. . . . We had set various goals in this battle and, by the grace of God, we achieved all our objectives without our rival getting any real victory. . . . We sought to obtain good information from inside the CIA. While Amiri was still in the U.S., we managed to establish contact with him in early 2010 and obtained very valuable information accordingly. He was managed and guided (by us).”

Here are articles from the New York Times, Global Security Newswire, and CNN with most of what is known about this in open sources. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Langley, Virginia right about now.

In June of 2009, while on a pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia, Shahram Amiri disappeared. The U.S. has a standing offer to Iranian nuclear scientists of five millions dollars (payable over time) and a new identity if they will defect, and rumor has it we have had several takers on the offer. Amiri, according to the CIA, was one of them, a voluntary “walk-in” who, it is said, provided considerable information about the state of the Iranian nuclear program, possibly including secret facilities not known of in the west.

Things started getting weird, however. Not long after Amiri “came in.” He reportedly  showed no interest in collecting the five million dollars in reward money and in the last couple months started posting YouTube videos claiming he was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA. Last Tuesday he showed up at the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC, sought refuge there, and announced his desire to return to Iran.

Our government was clearly caught off-balance by this. The State Department pronounced him free to go, but seemed confused when asked about the background of his arrival here. He came to study, they said. Oh? Which school?

Um . . . don’t really remember.

Did he defect to the U.S.?

“I just don’t know the answer,” P.J. Crowley, the State Department’s spokesman replied.

Notice, Crowley did not say, “We don’t comment on that.” He said, “I just don’t know.” Wow.

Now Amiri has flown back to Iran where he was, according to the BBC, met with a hero’s welcome.

If you are confused by all this, you are in good company, including, it would seem, the U.S. State Department. What in the world is going on here?

For starters, I don’t find the vague answers from the State Department suspicious so much as evidence of being blind-sided. They all pretty much boil down to, “Huh?” Answers this lame are the result of never having thought about the question, which suggests innocence — if not competence, foresight, or any of a bunch of other desirable attributes we could all rattle off.

Amiri’s story of kidnapping and torture also sounds pretty implausible to me. It’s not that we’ve never done stuff like that; we just don’t usually then let the guy wander around loose in the U.S. making YouTube videos about it. I mean, come on.

If the kidnapping and torture sound weak to us, how do they sound to Tehran? What, one wonders, does the Republican Guard think of all this? And yet, Amiri returned to a hero’s welcome. Maybe later he will be quietly shot. Maybe it will be portrayed as a CIA assassination, which will probably play well to home crowds, no matter how implausible it is on its face.

That is not to say we do not assassinate people – we do. We just don’t usually do so when there is so little to gain by it, and we are unlikely to risk a live human agent inside Iran just to do a little wet work on a guy who made us look like the Keystone Cops a hundred or so news cycles ago.

But what if the hero’s welcome is real?

Someone, presumably one of the shadowy Iranian defectors, told the U.S. that there was a secret nuclear weapons lab in a cave near Qom, Iran. When the “intelligence” was made public, the Iranians let the UN International Atomic Energy Agency inspect the site, and it turns out it was nothing but a hole in the side of the mountain.

Why would a defector feed U.S. intelligence false information suggesting the Iranian nuclear program was more advanced than it actually was? What advantage would Tehran gain by deliberately planting this information through a double agent?

One obvious advantage would be to deflect a potential military strike against a false target, keeping the location of genuine weapons labs (if there really are any) either secret or at least ambiguous. How many strike packages can the Israeli Air Force “sneak” through Saudi air space, after all.

Middle-Eastern analyst Juan Cole  has suggested that Amiri was an Iranian double agent, but he attributes the false intelligence to a different motivation. He suggests Iran finds itself in a situation he calls “Saddam’s Dilemna.” I like his reasoning on this one. Saddam’s Dilemna works something like this:

If you have nuclear weapons, the world leaves you alone. If you don’t have nuclear weapons, and there is no prospect you will, the U.S. leaves you alone but your neighbors can be difficult. If you might have nuclear weapons, your neighbors leave you alone, but the US gets nervous. So the trick is to convince your neighbors you might have nuclear weapons while convincing the US you either have none, or you are so close it is too late to do anything about it.

That’s pretty much what Saddam tried. He tried to convince his neighbors (and domestic political enemies) that he had a potent deterrent in his WMD arsenal, while trying to persuade the U.S. that he was no threat to them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk. Saddam bungled it, as he did so many things in his life, and we all know where that led. I’m not sure it’s a tightrope anyone can walk successfully.

If Iran is trying to do so, it’s hard to see all this having a happy ending.

Davis: You describe the 1967 film about Eddie Chapman, Triple Cross, in your book as a rather poor film that bore only a superficial relation to the truth.

Macintyre: I think it tried to turn Chapman into a James Bond character, which he was not, and missed the opportunity to make a really interesting and challenging film about the nature of heroism. It was essentially propaganda, in my view.

Davis: I thought it was a good thriller, if poor history. The cast – Christopher Plummer, Yul Brynner, Gert Frobe and others – were very good, in my view. Frobe portrayed Auric Goldfinger in the film Goldfinger and Triple Cross‘ director, Terence Young, as you know, directed the first two Bond films and the fourth in the series.

Macintyre: The film was entirely inaccurate, and despite some very good actors, I found the acting very wooden.

Davis: As you wrote a book, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, do you find it curious that Young knew both Chapman and Fleming?

Macintyre: I think there is a direct link between Chapman and the film version of Bond, in the sense that Connery modeled his performance on Young, who in turn modeled his own image on his former friend and flatmate, Eddie Chapman.

Davis: In part, yes, but I see more of Fleming’s Bond from the novels in the early films. Did Fleming know Chapman?

Macintyre: Not as far as I know.

Davis: Have you received any offers to make a film based on your book?

Macintyre: The film rights have been bought by New Line (Warner Bros.) with Tom Hank’s production company Playtone as co-producer. The first script has now been completed.

Davis: What actor would you like see portray Chapman?

Macintyre: The actor I would dearly love to play Chapman is James McAvoy. He is not only a brilliant actor, and British, but he has that callow, slightly dodgy expression, while being extremely good-looking. That would fit Chapman perfectly.

Davis: How, and why, should we remember Chapman?

Macintyre: As both an example and warning: he was a very bad man who managed, for one very brief period of his life, to find the inner mettle to do something very good indeed.

Davis: Are you working on a new book?

Macintyre: Yes, another wartime espionage and deception story, coming out next year. I cannot say any more, as it is under wraps!

Davis: I read and enjoy your Times column online. Does being a columnist for a major British newspaper that maintains historical archives help you in your research of books on historical people?

Macintyre: I have found the Times archive hugely useful for all my books, but these archives are now full digitized and accessible to the public, so working for the Times does not really give the advantage it once did!

Davis: I truly enjoyed Agent ZigZag and I look forward to reading your new book as well.

Read parts one and two of the interview.

Paul Davis also writes an American crime blog for GreatHistory.com. You can visit Paul Davis’ web site here . You can reach him at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net

The editors of American History magazine compiled their list of the 100 Greatest Spy Movies. Now they want you to vote in an elimination-style tournament to determine (swell the music) The Greatest Spy Movie of All Time!

The voting takes place in the forums hosted on our partner site, ArmchairGeneral. Click here to go to the forums and accept your 100 Greatest Spy Movies mission. Scroll down to Qualification Rounds A, B, C. and D. Be sure to vote in all four, selecting eight movies in each. After each list you’ll find a short synopsis of every movie on it. You can also leave comments about your favorite films, films you think should have been on the lists but aren’t and those you wouldn’t have included on the lists. Preliminary voting ends December 10!

If you aren’t already registered on ACG’s forums, click here. We don’t spam, and we don’t sell or trade information.

For detailed information on each film, plus data on “Reel vs. Real Spies,” look for 100 Greatest Spy Movies, available on newsstands December 8.

If you’re an espionage buff, check out Paul Davis’ espionage blogs on Great History.

Wanted by the police for a safecracking job in Scotland prior to the start of World War II, Chapman fled to the Island of Jersey. The Nazis captured Jersey in 1939 and imprisoned Chapman. An accomplished con man as well as a safecracker, Chapman convinced the Abwehr, the German foreign intelligence service, that he would make a fine spy for them.

The Abwehr trained Chapman in wireless radio, codes, explosives and other spy tradecraft. Chapman parachuted back into Great Britain in 1941 with orders to destroy an airplane factory.

Once on the ground, Chapman quickly turned himself in to MI5, the British Security Service. For the rest of the war, Chapman operated as a double agent. He ended the war with a German Iron Cross and a British pardon for his pre-war crimes.

Ben Macintyre’s Agent ZigZag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal tells the amazing story of Chapman’s double life as a Nazi spy and British agent.

Below is part two of my interview:

Davis: How did you research your book? Did you interview people who knew Chapman?

Macintyre: The research material was a combination of documentary material from the files, interviews with living associates and relatives of Chapman, memoirs, diaries, photographs and other sources.

Davis: Did you receive cooperation from the British Security Services when you were researching the book?

Macintyre: Yes, principally from MI5, which even provided an additional, missing file just before publication. For a secretive organization, the Security Service could not have been more open.

Davis: Do you believe Chapman was treated poorly by the British Government after the war?

Macintyre: In some ways, yes. He certainly thought so. On the other hand, he had manipulated his handlers thoroughly, and escaping prosecution for his many crimes was probably reward enough. He was never going to get a medal, however much he thought he deserved one.

Davis: You also wrote another book,  The Napoleon of Crime, a book about Adam Worth, the criminal that Conan Doyle modeled Sherlock Holmes’ nemeses Professor Moriarty on. Do criminals and con men make good subjects for books?

Macintyre: I certainly seem to be attracted, as subjects, to these people who live on the fringes of society. I find I am far more interested in the unknown and the uncertain than the great and the good: and people like Chapman, who managed to be great and very bad at the same time.

Davis: Although their characters and actions are certainly interesting, criminals do lie and cheat for a living. Did you have any difficulties separating Chapman’s boasts and lies from the truth?

Macintyre: Yes: he wrote an autobiography that was largely fiction, and maintained many of his own myths until his death.

More of my interview with Ben Macintyre in my next blog.

Paul Davis’s web site can be read here He can be reached at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net

Although Christopher Plummer portrayed Chapman as a crook and Bond-like character, the real Chapman, I would later discover, was a bit more complicated.

Chapman was imprisoned by the Nazis after they captured the Channel Island of Jersey in 1939. A safecracker and con man, he convinced his captors that he would spy for them against the British.

He was trained in spy tradecraft and then dropped by parachute into England, where he promptly contacted British Intelligence. His double game began.

Chapman would go on to be awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans and pardoned for his past crimes by the British.

Ben Macintyre’s Agent ZigZag: The True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love and Betrayal (Harmony Books), is a well- written and researched book that shines a light on Chapman’s character and his incredible actions during the war.

I contacted Macintyre, a writer-at-large and associate editor of the London Times, and interviewed him about his book.

Davis: Why did you write a book about Eddie Chapman?

Macintyre: I wrote the book for, essentially, three reasons: the obituary we published in The Times when Chapman died in 1996 intrigued me: it seemed that the obituary writer really did not believe all the things Chapman had claimed about his life, and that if I could find out the truth, it would be fascinating. I began collecting material on Chapman from that point on. Then, in 2002, there was a change of philosophy in MI5 about the release of secret material, and gradually the files on Agent Zigzag began to be released to the National Archives. The final reason was that I became utterly obsessed by Chapman, who seemed to me to be a character unlike any I had come across before: entirely dishonest, resolutely selfish, opportunistic and manipulative, but also charming, generous and astonishingly brave.

Davis: What did he accomplish as a double agent? Did his spying greatly aid the war effort?

Macintyre: In practical terms, Chapman’s main achievement was in diverting the pilotless V1 bombs that Hitler unleashed on London in the last stages of the war, by sending messages indicating false positions for the impact of the bombs. By convincing the Germans that the bombs were overshooting, the plan was to persuade them to shorten the range, thus ensuring that the bombs fell in under- or unpopulated areas. It was extraordinarily successful. He also extracted a great deal of money from the Abwehr, provided MI5 with a complete picture of how the enemy espionage machine worked and general helped to convince the Abwehr that it had a fully functioning spy network in Britain, when it had nothing of the sort.

More of the interview with Ben Macintyre in my next blog.

Paul Davis also writes an American crime blog for GreatHistory.com.

Paul Davis’ web site can be accessed here He can reached at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net.

“I don’t know which accusation hurts most,” Hunt continued. “Two are outrageous overstatements and one is a matter of opinion. Need I explain which is which? Whatever the case, none of them describes the whole man, and all disregard over two decades of service to the United States, first as a sailor in World War II, then as an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) operative, segueing into many years as a CIA agent.”

Hunt lead an interesting life before, during and after the Watergate incident. His book reads like a thriller when he tells of his stint in the Navy in World War II and his time in the OSS and the CIA, which is not surprising, considering that as a sideline to his CIA career, he was a prolific writer of spy and crime thrillers.

Hunt writes about his involvement in the CIA-engineered coup in Guatemala in 1954 and the less successful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. He also disputes the allegations by conspiracy-buffs that he was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

After he retired from the CIA he went to work for the Nixon White House as a  member of the “Plumbers” team. The team was tasked with stopping the many leaks to the press and performing a number of political dirty tricks.

Hunt spends a good portion of the book describing his role in the Watergate break-in. He tells what led up to it, how they planned it, what happened when they were discovered and the aftermath.

Although Hunt was a war veteran and a long-serving government employee who had never been convicted of a crime, he was slammed hard. His wife died in a plane crash at the time, so sending Hunt to prison for 33 months effectively made his children orphans.

The Watergate break-in ruined a good number of lives and forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign. He too might have gone to prison had President Ford not pardoned him.

In my view, Nixon’s resignation, along with the Conngressional War Powers Act, emboldened the North Vietnamese to invade South Vietnam in 1975.

American combat troops were gone and the Communists knew that without Nixon, Americans troops would not return to Vietnam and the Americans would not mount a bombing campaign to halt the Communist invasion.

Watergate was a minor break-in that had major consequences.

Hunt is somewhat unrepentant, believing to the end that he was working for the country’s good. He failed to see that neither he nor the president are above the law.

In American Spy, Hunt, who died at 88 in 2007, described his life and offers a whole man – before, during and after Watergate.

Paul Davis also writes about American crime. His web site is here . He can be reached at pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net.

There was a time when spying was a dirty little secret that governments did not talk about or acknowledge. Today we generally acknowledge the need for intelligence and respect the intelligence professional.

Spy stories in novels, films and TV have both helped and hurt the intelligence profession. Most of the fictional depictions of intelligence officers, agents, spies and special operators are poorly done and bare little resemblance to reality.

While some have portrayed the spy unfavorably, most thrillers portray the spy as a romantic hero or heroine. In my view, spy thrillers have helped to create a positive public interest in intelligence matters.

The International Spy Museum, called SPY for short, is the only public museum in the United States dedicated to the tradecraft, history and contemporary role of espionage.

SPY, located at 800 F Street, NW, in the historic Penn Quarter, presents artifacts, historic photographs, interactive displays, film and video to tell the story of espionage in history.

During my visit I saw that the many young students there found the museum interesting and inspiring. As I recall from my own youth, museums tend to be awfully boring places for young people, but SPY caught their attention and interest.

SPY offers a gallery called The Secret History of History,which chronicles spying throughout history – from biblical times to the early 20th Century – and visitors can learn about well-known historical figures who served as spymasters, such as George Washington and the author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe.

In other gallery called Spies Among Us, visitors learn about the amazing and heroic stories of World War II espionage. One highlight was the exhibit on celebrity spies during the war, such as film director John Ford, chef Julia Child and actress Marlene Dietrich.

Another gallery that particularly interested me, as I was a minor participant in the latter part of the Cold War, was The War of the Spies. This gallery examines the Cold War, using a mock post-World War II Berlin as a theatrical backdrop.

SPY also deals with contemporary espionage and intelligence issues as well. SPY offers a film called Ground Truth, which looks at challenges facing intelligence professionals in the 21st century, and a new gallery called Weapons of Mass Disruption deals with the current threats of cyber-warfare.

I saw that the students, as well as some adults, truly enjoyed the interactive exhibits at SPY. Operation Spy allows participants to assume the role of a U.S. spy on a mission to locate a missing nuclear device before the bad guys find it. Through live-action, video characters, special effects and one’s imagination, participants can come close to being a real spy.

Visit SPY’s webpage..

Paul Davis also writes an American Crime blog for GreatHistory.com. His web page is here and his e-mail address is pauldavisoncrime@comcast.net

I thought that Larry Berman’s Perfect Spy was a fawning and uncritical look at An, but found Thomas A. Bass’ The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game to be a more balanced book.

Bass wrote that An’s intelligence reports were read by the top North Vietnamese leaders General Giap and Ho Chi Minh.

“We are now in the United States’ War Room!” Giap and Minh are reported to have said, rubbing their hands with glee.

That An was a good spy should not be surprising, as we helped train him. Prior to traveling to America to study journalism, An worked for the legendary General Edward Lansdale. Lansdale, an Air Force officer attached to the CIA, was an expert on counterinsurgency and was one of the most knowledgeable Americans about Vietnam. Lansdale and his crack  team instructed An in psychological warfare and intelligence tradecraft.

An went on to betray Lansdale and many other American and Vietnamese friends. An also betrayed his journalist colleagues, yet many of them continue to admire him.

“I began to suspect that I had fallen into the same trap as An’s former colleagues,” Bass wrote in his book. “They had swapped ignorance for willful ignorance and remained charmed to the end by An’s smiling presence.”

Not all of his colleagues felt that way. Beverly Ann Deepe, a reporter with The New York Herald Tribune, was angered at An’s betrayal and Murray Cant, the chief of correspondents for Time, called him an SOB and said he’d like to kill him.

Zalin Grant, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, journalist and author of Over the Beach: The Air War in Vietnam and Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam, wrote that he thought An was a communist hero, but not an American hero.

When an excerpt from Bass’s book appeared in The New Yorker in 2005 and quoted journalists singing An’s praises, Grant wrote a letter to the magazine editor.

“It was one thing to have been against the Vietnam War – many of us were,” Grant wrote. “But quite another to express unconditional admiration for a man who spent a large part of his life pretending to be a journalist while helping to kill Americans.”

Joseph Goulden, in his Washington Times review of Berman’s book on An, wrote that a thought kept crossing his mind as he read the book.

“Would the journalists who now praise An as a patriot be equally forgiving of a colleague who turned out to be working for the CIA at the same time he was reporting on the war?” Goulden asked. “Think about it,” he added.

This is Part III of a three-part series. Read Part II and Part I.

Paul Davis also writes an American Crime blog for GreatHistory.com. His web site is http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/site/ and his e-mail address is daviswrite@aol.com.